In article <3BAE4726.DAF9FBEA@geocities.com> , "Jon A. Cruz" 
<jon### [at] geocitiescom> wrote:

> The specific-to-a-single-TTF-file problem is probably important.
>
>
> If anyone needs it, I have an old Java program I started that will let you
> look into a ttf and check it's structure. It will also flag fonts that are
> broken for 3.1.

(Warning: Technical description ahead!  Users who don't know details about
the inner workings of TrueType fonts should not jump to any conclusions
based on this description!)

There have been many changes in 3.5 as to how fonts and text strings are
handled.  In particular POV-Ray is now able to search more than one cmap
table.  What the charset selection does (apart from some parser enforced
limits for ASCII characters) is basically change the search order of cmap
tables.  The "ascii" charset first looks into the MacRoman (1/0), then the
Windows Unicode cmap (3/1), and finally in the common symbol cmap (3/0).
The "utf8" and "sys" search order is 3/1, 1/0 and 3/0.

In theory this should cover all available fonts and allow access to all
characters of (Windows) Unicode fonts provided the charset is "utf8" and the
input really is utf8.  I did some testing when I originally implemented the
change and it worked very well for all special German and Japanese
characters I tested.  Of course, it requires a text editor that supports
UTF-8 text files.  I know the POV-Ray Mac text editor does _not_ support
UTF-8 text files, and AFAIK the POV-Ray Win text editor does not support
UTF-8 either.  As for" notepad", I would really be surprised if it supports
UTF-8, but I haven't used it in anything newer than Win 98...


    Thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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